The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is the mega-competitive hackathon, where people miscellaneously participate and build some open source solutions by bringing up a concept, and utilizing it by coding, designing, visualizing, using a hardware in only 2-days.

Organizers

The competition was organized by Rah-e Qamar at The Millennium University  & College this year in three major cities i.e. Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore in Pakistan.

The main lead of this event was the founder of Rah-e Qamar, Iftekhar Yezdani. The competition was held for the very first time in Karachi and Lahore, where Hassan Bin Zaki who is the head of Rah-e-Qamar in Karachi overseen the competition in Karachi.

As global issues are increasing day by day adversely affecting the global community and environment, in order to lessen this issue NASA is looking out for solutions. Technologists, scientists, engineers, designers, programmers, developers, entrepreneurs, problem solvers, idealist, and students together with NASA can undertake this issue.

The theme of NASA Space Apps Challenge 2018

The theme for this year was ‘EARTH’ and SPACE’ following by the 20 challenges in 6 different categories which are:

1.   Can You Build A…,
2.   Help Others Discover the Earth,
3.   Volcanoes Icebergs and Asteroids(oh my),
4.   What The World Need Now Is…,
5.   An Icy Glare,
6.   A Universe of Beauty and Wonder

These categories have been chosen from the theme in search of innovative solutions adequate to real global issues. To get a hold on these issues NASA arranged the competition where participants were given datasets, services, and tools with associated agencies in the given time frame of 48-hours.

Winner – Team ThuderX (Location: Karachi – Pakistan)

Team ThuderX is the winner of this competition from Karachi. The members of this team are:

• Jibran Yousuf
• Syed Muhammad Hamza
• Uroosh Mashall
• Setara Arain

ThuderX developed an application, NASA News Alert App consisting of two separate modules. Module-1 has features which will provide an accurate news update on new events, new space missions and predicting the natural occurrence by using Machine Learning to the space science students and faculty.

Module-2 is based on fusing AI Chat Bot in the application, that way user can directly interact with the resources and authentic data & reports.

Detailed Information

Project Link

You can find the complete project link here

Video Link

Watch the YouTube video.

Runners-up – Team Shark_Bot

Team Shark Bot was the runner-up from Karachi, the team members are:

• Hadiqa Ahmed
• Kanwal Shameem
• Dua Khan
• Eruj S. Qadri
• Kiran Noor
• Ghulam Nabi Ahmed Hassan
• Mirza Zulqarnain

They invented a submerged vehicle which goes inside the sea and sends the pictures and recordings and procedures the deep sea pictures into refined pictures which can be utilized for remote ocean submarine following, submerged automaton and deep sea investigation of various types of plants, fishes and different organisms.

Detailed Information

You can find all the details here

Winner – Team Space Board (Location: Islamabad – Pakistan)

Team Space Board was the winner from Islamabad, the team members are:

• Danyal Khan
• Zara Shafique
• Muhammad Bilal Afzal

They operated and joined NASA Earth science data and citizen data to review and learn about the connections between human, animal and environmental health.

Detailed Information

Project Link

You can access the project link here

Video Link

You can watch the video on YouTube too.

Runners-up – Team DOD

Team DOD was the runner-up from Islamabad with the team members being:

• Salman Ali Thepdawala
• Mostafa Ali
• Waleed Khan
• Zarar Younis
• Talha Farooq

They created a crowdsourcing tool for citizens to contribute to early detection, verification, tracking, visualization and notification of wildfires.

Global Nominees

These 4 teams has been nominated as a global nominee from Pakistan, where they will be competing with other teams for the global awards where the ideas across the space apps universe are recognized global recognition.

The categories for awards are:

1.   Best use of data
2.   Best use of hardware
3.   Best mission concept
4.   Galactic impact
5.   Most inspirational
6.   Best use of science.

The winners of Global award are featured on the Space Apps website and receive an invitation to visit NASA’s Kennedy Space Center with the Space Apps Global Organizing Team.

Message from the Curator

The Curator of NASA Space Apps Challenge said to make it more wonderful and competitive next year with the increasing number of participants and activities.